Erica Verrillo has written seven books and published five. She doesn't know why anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would ever want to publish. But, if you insist on selling your soul to the devil, learn how to do it right: marketing, literary agents, book promotion, editing, pitching your book, how to get reviews, and ... most important of all ... everything she did wrong.
In the interests of protecting the right to free speech, she did not vote for Trump.
#NotMyPresident

Thursday, May 30, 2013

You’ve
finally completed your book. You’ve had it critiqued – brutally –
and done more revisions than you care to count. Your proofreader has
made sure there’s not a single error in the entire manuscript, and
now you are confident that your work is ready to be published. What
next? Obviously, you need an agent. So, after searching AgentQuery
for agents representing your genre, and consulting Jeff Herman’s
Guide
and the most recent Writer’s
Digest,
you are sitting down to compose the perfect query letter.

Stop.
You’ve skipped some steps.

Before
you can even think about contacting an agent, there are several
important questions you must be able to answer. Why? Because, if an
agent calls you, she or he will ask them. (I know this from painful
personal experience.) You must
be prepared to reply with compelling answers.

This
short quiz will tell you if you are ready to take on the publishing
industry.

1)
Have you written a one-page summary of your novel? Do you have a
“hook,” an intriguing sentence that will draw your audience into
your story, for example: “A man wakes up one morning to discover
that every single person he knows is trying to kill him – even his
wife and kids – and he has no idea why.” Can you keep your
agent’s full attention for three minutes while you describe
(verbally, or in writing) the rest of the story? In short, if your
agent asks, “What’s your book about?” can you sell it? 20
points

2)
Have you researched your market? Who will buy your book? Agents rely
on numbers because publishers do, so you have to be able to say, with
accuracy, how many people are in your demographic. (Hint, “adults”
is not a demographic. College-educated, married women with small
children is a demographic.) 20 points

3)
What is your competition? Your agent will want to know the titles,
authors, publishers, and year of publication of other popular books
in your genre (or field). There are two reasons for identifying your
competition: 1) You have to prove that there is already
a market for your kind of book, and 2) You have to prove that your
book is better or different. (Give specifics.) 20 points

4)
How will you reach your market? Do you have a platform? You may
think that marketing is the job of your publisher, and it is. But
agents must convince editors that not only is there a market for your
book, but that you have the credentials, and visibility, to promote
your work. In the old days, BI (before internet), this was done
through book tours, signings, and talks. You can still do those
things, but what agents really want to know is how many people are
reading your blog/website. (Publishers are fond of the number 10,000,
so it helps to be able to say, “My blog/website has had 10,000+
page views.”) If you have published other books, how many were
sold? Do people in your field or niche know who you are? Do you have
any famous contacts who can give you endorsements? 20 points

5)
Do you, in Michael Larsen’s immortal words, “harbor a consuming
lust for success,” and are you “irresistibly driven to do
whatever it takes to make your books sell?” Your agent will expect
you go the whole nine yards, and to comply – eagerly – with
whatever sports metaphors your publisher will hurl at you. This is no
time to be a shrinking violet. You are going to have to step up to
the mat and bat a thousand. 20points

If
you scored a hundred, congratulations! You are ready to contact an
agent. If you answered, “I don't need to do that,” “I can't do
that,” or “Huh?,” to any of the above questions, then get to
work!

How
to score 100 on the test

1)
Fortunately, there are a many good books about pitches and proposals.
I recommend Michael Larsen's How
to Write a Book Proposal.
(This book is also useful for fiction.) Larsen really understands the
publishing industry, so you can rely on his advice. To get the hang
of preparing pitches, start with a pitch for a book you haven't
written. If your one-sentence hook can make your friends want to
read the book, then move on to pitching your own work.

2)
To determine your demographic, check the Alexa ranking for every
well-trafficked website related to your genre or field. Alexa
includes a demographic profile for high-ranking sites. Identify all
the organizations or groups that might have an interest in your
topic. What is their membership?

3)
Amazon is one of the greatest research tools of all time. To identify
your competition, look up the bestsellers in your genre. What books
are on the top 100 lists? Who publishes them? Use the “look inside”
feature to compare those books with your own. (Google Books also
allows generous previews.)

4)
Building a platform takes time. But you can accumulate 10,000 page
views in a few months if you blog about interesting topics – and
if you do some social networking. Advertise your blog posts on BookBlogs, Goodreads, and LinkedIn groups. You can precycle your posts
on blogs that get more traffic than yours. You can recycle your
blogs, as well, on sites that accept reprints. Look up the "Top 50
blogs" in your genre on Blogrank and read them! High-ranking blogs
invariably contain lots of insider tips, trends, news, and industry
gossip.

5) Getting
writers to harbor a consuming lust for anything other than writing
is a tall order. Writers are an idealistic lot, deeply committed to
exploring the human soul while crouched in front of a keyboard in a
dim, unheated garret. Before you contact an agent, you need to go
through a metamorphosis – from idealistic writer, to practical
businessman. When your agent asks if you will do anything
to sell your book (mine did), there can only be one answer.

Friday, May 24, 2013

"I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk." ~Stephen KingStephen King - he's smart, he's successful and he says exactly what he thinks. He also grew up without a TV. That explains a lot.____________________Stephen King on What He Read as a Kid
By Ken Tucker

Sunday’s PARADE features a rare interview with master storyteller Stephen King. His new novel, Joyland (a paperback original due June 4), follows lovelorn college student Devin Jones, who, while working at a small-time amusement park, learns the secret history behind a shocking murder.

“I’ve been typed as a horror writer, but I never saw myself that way,” King tells PARADE’s Ken Tucker. “I’ve reached a point in my life where I can write pretty much what comes into my mind and not worry about grocery day at Publix.”

In the exclusive online extras below, King shares the horror classic his mom read to him as a child and his views on gun control, a subject he also addresses in the Kindle Single essay Guns. Be sure to check out this weekend’s issue of PARADE for the full story.

Monday, May 20, 2013

This must-read study was posted on Smashwords on May 8th. If you want to find out what the best price for an ebook is, if long books sell better than short books, how many book sell well, and what the average word count for the 60 bestselling Smashwords romance books is - go HERE.

New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooksMay 8, 2013

"Last year at the 2012 RT Booklovers in Chicago, I released a first-of-its-kind study that analyzed indie ebook sales data. Our goal was to identify potential factors that could help authors sell more ebooks.

Last week at the 2013 RT Booklovers convention in Kansas City, I shared new, updated data in a session titled, Money, Money, Money — Facts & Figures for Financial Payoff. Now I'm sharing this data and my findings with you.

Some of the results were surprising, some were silly, and some I expect will inform smarter pricing and publishing decisions in the year ahead.

For the study this year, we analyzed over $12 million in sales for a collection of 120,000 Smashwords ebooks from May 1, 2012 through March 31, 2013. We aggregated our sales data from across our retail distribution network, which includes the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Amazon (only about 200 of our 200,000 titles are at Amazon). As the world's largest indie ebook distributor, I think our study represents the most comprehensive analysis ever of how ebooks from self-published authors and small independent presses are behaving in the marketplace."

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Neil Gaiman is one of the darlings of sci-fi. Like another British-born sci-fi darling, Douglas Adams,his wit is dry, and his prose whimsical.

Gaiman started out as a journalist, but quit when he realized that “British newspapers can make up anything they want and publish it as fact.” (Sound familiar?) In spite of his disillusionment with the medium, journalism was a good springboard for Gaiman, as it was for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stephen King, and Hemingway. (For all its faults, journalism trains writers to produce, and to not waste words.)

In this commencement speech, Gaiman, without wasting too many words, summarizes the craft of writing, which is to make art out of experience.

For all young - and old - writers, wherever you are, watch this. Neil Gaiman has it down.

"Whatever you do, you have one thing that is unique. You have the ability to make art.

When things get tough ... make good art.

Husband runs off with a politician ... make good art.

Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor ... make good art.

IRS on your trail ... make good art.

Cat exploded ... make good art.

Someone on the internet thinks what you are doing is stupid, or evil, or it's all been done before ... make good art.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice. Your mind. Your story. Your vision."

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

If you aren't already reading Publisher's Weekly, you need to sign up and get their free newsletter. This is where you will find Industry news, trends, and occasional juicy gossip. In this article, Bowker director Carl Kulo reveals that paperbacks are still garnering the lion's share of the market. (It's hardly surprising ... which would you rather take to the beach, an old paperback or your brand-new Kindle Fire?)

At Publishers Weekly’s May 8 discussion series on trends in consumer book-buying, held at the offices of Random House in New York City, Carl Kulo, U.S. director of Bowker Market Research, highlighted the major shifts that took place in 2012 in such key areas as sales by format and by channel.

E-books captured 11% of all book spending last year, up from 7% in 2011, Kulo reported, while e-books accounted for 22% of units in 2012, up from 14% the prior year. In 2010, e-books accounted for only 2% of spending. Despite the gains made by digital, paperback remained the most popular format last year, accounting for 43% of spending, down one percentage point from 2011, while hardcovers represented 37% of dollar sales, down from 39%.

Friday, May 10, 2013

The Great Gatsby hits theaters today, and, predictably, the paperback tie-in hit #1 on bestseller lists. But, F. Scott Fitzgerald never saw his book become a success. In fact, at his untimely death at the age of 44, he had earned a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. Read Newspaper Alum's great blog on why it took so long for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece to make it to the big time.

"On May 10th, Baz Luhrmann's new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece ``The Great Gatsby’’ hits theaters nationwide starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke. The official premiere of the film kicked off at a star-studded event at Lincoln Center on Wednesday with a dazzling 3-D spectacle.

``The Great Gatsby’’, written by Fitzgerald while living with his wild and mentally unstable wife Zelda in France and Italy in 1924 and early 1925, tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby (born James Gatz), once a poor young man who rose to become fabulously rich (through bootlegging) embraces a corrupted form of the American Dream by worshiping the monied class of Daisy Buchanan, a former flame of his while enlisted in World War I. Gatsby finally meets her again for the first time in five years and ultimately becomes destroyed by pursuing what he naively thinks will bring him happiness and fulfillment. The theme of disillusionment with American contemporary culture and its fraudulent emphasis on wealth and power are common threads found throughout the novel. But probably ``The Great Gatsby’s’’ most enduring impact was educating succeeding generations about the roaring 20’s, namely about jazz, gambling, excess drinking, and reckless living.

Whether the film meets with upbeat praise or is scorned by critics; the film will more than likely cause film goers to dust off ``The Great Gatsby’’ from their bookshelves or dash off to the library or their Kindle’s to reread what is now considered the Great American novel.

It’s shocking how long it took ``The Great Gatsby’’ to be considered a classic. It wasn’t until April 24, 1960, for example, that The New York Times wrote: ``It is probably safe now to say that it [The Great Gatsby] is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction.’’

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

In a fascinating wrinkle on the self-publishing scene, three writers are suing Penguin's newly acquired Author Solutions after having paid thousands of dollars for “developmental” packages that included bogus editing and marketing services which were either substandard or simply not delivered at all. "The company's true business is not publishing, the complaint stresses, but selling services to authors." Given the recent rush of conventional publishing houses into the former territory of vanity presses, it will be interesting to see how this suit plays out.

"Three authors have filed suit against self-publishing service provider Author Solutions, and its parent company Penguin, airing a laundry list of complaints and alleging the company is engaged in deceitful, dubious business practices. “Defendants have marketed themselves as an independent publisher with a reputation for outstanding quality and impressive book sales," the complaint reads. "Instead, Defendants are not an independent publisher, but a print-on-demand vanity press.”

Monday, May 6, 2013

A Hollywood agent is about to go
bankrupt. He has no clients, and even less in his bank account. So
Satan pays him a visit. “I can get Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt,
and Tom Cruise to sign on with you. In return, I want your soul.”
The agent ponders the offer for a moment and then says, “But what
do you get out of the deal?”

To a certain extent, agents deserve
their reputations. Agents are middlemen. They don't create, they
don't publish, they simply pass along the work of others. Agents
don't have to understand the finer nuances of what you've written, or
grasp the subtleties of your prose. They don't even have to like
your work (although it helps). All an agent really has to do is sell
your book to a publisher. In order to do that, he or she must
convince a publisher that
your book is the best thing since sliced bread.

This is where the writer and the agent
often find themselves at loggerheads. Writers want to be appreciated
by the person who represents them. We want them to love our talent,
to wrangle the best possible contract out of megalith publishing
houses, and we want them to ensure that lots and lots publicity and
attention will be lavished on our work.

In short, we want to have our cake and
eat it too. We want the agent to be both an admirer and a salesman.

Why we resent them

They don't call. They don't write. So,
where's the love?

Like the increasingly fictitious
publisher whose sole purpose in life is to nurture budding authors,
the unconditional love of an agent is a pipe dream. In general,
agents have even less appreciation for the written word – and for
the people who write it – than publishers do. They are looking for
a quick lucrative sale. God forbid you should write something that is
not, as one agent put it, (referring to a manuscript I'd sent him),
“a walk in the park.”

Michael Larsen, in his revealing book, How to Get a Literary Agent, says that, “as a writer, you are the most important
person in the publishing process, because you make it go.” This
is quite true. However, if writers are like cars, then agents are the
gas. (Or if agents are like cars, we are gas. Dumb analogies work in
any order.) The point is that without an agent, we may as well not
exist, as far as publishers are concerned.

Agents are aware of that fact. And that
is why agents are harder to snare than a publisher. This is also why
they insist that you compose a “perfect pitch.” The query letter,
or “pitch,” is not just a brief summary of your work and
credentials, it is the script for what your agent will later tell an
editor. And it is the script for what the editor will tell the
publisher. If you feel as if you are doing their work for them, you
are. But you are a writer, so man up.

Why we need them

Realistically speaking, agents aren't
there to hold your hand. They are there to make a buck, which they
can't do without you. The good news is that they know how to do that
job a lot better than anybody else.

This is what agents can do for you:

Secure a publishing house

Negotiate a contract

Teach you about the publishing
business

Securing a publishing house is still
the grand prize – even in this age of 200,000+ (and counting) Indie
authors, KDP Select promos, and whiz kids with six-figure incomes
from ebooks they wrote in less than a month during study hall.
Nothing will give you as much cachet as being published by one of the
big five. Even the mid-size houses will give you a pedigree you
simply cannot get from self-publishing. An agent can get you there.

Secondly, negotiating a contract is not
something you want to do on your own, no matter how many books you
have read on the subject. Publishing contracts are written by lawyers
who are paid a lot of money to keep the best interests of the
publishing company in mind. As a consequence, publishing contracts
are designed to ensare, confuse, and bludgeon writers into
submission. (Trust me, after reading 17 pages of legalese, you will
want to run, screaming, back into obscurity.) Your agent, because he
or she has done this before, will know which clauses to strike out,
when to ask for more, and how to convince the publisher to comply
with your best interests.

The last thing that agents do is teach
you how the publishing business really works. This may be the most
important thing agents have to offer. The entertainment business, of
which publishing is a part, is based on mythology: Talent is
“discovered,” hard work is rewarded, and stars are delivered by
the stork. People who have not been exposed to the inner workings of
the publishing world have no concept of how labyrinthine, how
medieval, how disorganized it actually is. Your agent knows,
because chances are good that he or she was once an editor. This is a
business that is run on daily memos, and is dominated by people
who understand how to juggle the system. Nobody understands that
system better than an agent. If you pay attention, you can learn
everything you need to know about publishing from an experienced
agent. As a writer, that knowledge will prove, not just useful, but
invaluable.

These three books will help you
understand agents, and what they can actually do for you. I guarantee you will benefit from reading them.

Michael Larsen. How
to Get a Literary Agent. (Sourcebooks,
2006)

Larsen's book is pure gold. Make
sure you read every word before you contact an agent.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Ida Pollock (April 12, 1908 – December 3, 2013) wrote her first novel when she was just 14, and at age 105 she was still writing romance novels. There was never a question in Ida’s mind that she was meant to be a writer, although her direction did not become clear until her mother asked her to write 'something pretty'. For Ida, romance novels are not just pretty, they are a source of joy. “My books are full of hope and romance rather than sex,” she says. “They are a form of escapism - you can escape the parts of the world that you don't like.”____________________

Writer Ida Pollock was today hailed the world's oldest romantic novelist as it was revealed she is still producing steamy books at the age of 105.

"Ida has written 123 novels during her prolific career - many of them tales of virgins, chaste kisses and dashing male heroes. Ida has sold millions of books over nine decades with risque titles such as 'White Heat' and 'Interlude for Love'. She has millions of fans but has largely avoided the limelight by writing under ten different pseudonyms. Ida has written 70 books for Mills & Boon under the names Susan Barrie, Pamela Kent, Rose Burghley or Mary Whistler.

Despite turning 105 last week Ida is still writing and her latest novel The Runaway is due to be published shortly."